650 Group Blog

We attended Mobile World Congress Americas (MWCa) in Los Angeles, CA this week, as well as the AT&T Spark event in San Francisco. Since 5G is launching first the US, these two events became the public events where significant 5G-related announcements happened.

Verizon. Will launch 5G Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) on October 1 in four markets: Houston, Indianapolis, Los Angeles and Sacramento.

AT&T. The company reiterated its own 5G plans (mobile 5G by year-end 2018 in cities such as Atlanta, Charlotte, Dallas, Indianapolis, Oklahoma City, Raleigh, Waco, Houston, Jacksonville, Lousville, New Orleans and San Antonia), plus it made some announcements like that it is beginning 5G-ready CBRS equipment testing (using Samsung CBRS equipment and CommScope as SAS provider). Also, at the Spark event on Monday, the company announced three strategic telecom equipment suppliers, Ericsson, Nokia and Samsung.

T-Mobile. Announced that it had completed a Cisco vEPC system (upgradeable to 5G Core) carrying traffic for 70M users that was from Cisco. It also announced that it signed a $3.5B 5G agreement with Ericsson. This is in addition to the July 30 announcement made earlier with Nokia for $3.5B, as well. Generally, the company has set expectations as recently as September 10 that it will provide nationwide 5G by the year 2020.

Additionally, discussions about spectrum in the US market were very active discussions. Some points we picked up on:

No new mid-band auctions will occur in the US market for another 2-3 years, so this means that new capacity is going to come from LAA (just announced on the iPhone Xs this week, as well) and from CBRS (discussed above).

The "who has the fastest 5G throughput" battle will be won at the millimeter wave. In other words, using millimeter was, speeds as high as 10 Gbps are possible, but with mid-band (1-6 Ghz), where LTE is currently deployed, cannot go much over 2 Gbps. So, to beat the Ookla Speed Test, the mobile operators who deploy mmWave early will get a leg up. However, in order to deploy mmWave, these have to be small-cells that are within 100 meters of users. Since it is so difficult to get real-estate rights and backhaul for small cells, this is going to be a big challenge. Nevertheless, this is how the battle will be won.

Ericsson and Cisco representatives provided an upbeat presentation about the corporate partnership, offered some customer success metrics and discussed some new initiatives. The teams held back from providing concrete measures of progress such as revenues. Our judgement is that since each is continuing to make joint offerings, the relationship is moving ahead.

Customer engagement progress was characterized at 100+ deals and 300+ engagements. It is interesting to figure out what each of the two parties deliver to customers. The way the two companies characterize what each is good at and what each delivers to customers is quite similar to the way it was characterized at the previous year's MWC 2016 presentation - with one possible exception: Each of the spokespersons said that customers are using the Ericsson wireless packet core (Cisco also sells wireless packet core).

Roles and Responsibilities. Generally, the teams still see the roles and responsibilities split up as follows:

Cisco does "IP," generally and specifically cited routing and WiFi

Ericsson does Radio Access and provides professional services, OSS/BSS and typically serves as the Systems Integrator

Cisco sees this partnership as a means to target emerging markets. This is because Ericsson has significant market presence in emerging markets.

Working on smaller deals up front, then if the relationship works, will pursue bigger sized deals.

Given how strategic the NFV landscape is for the future of the telecom industry, we were interested in each company's participation in NFV Orchestration. The partners say the way they split up the orchestration between each other would typically be as follows: Cisco's NSO is used typically in managing the network and resources (Cisco claims it wins big here). Ericsson's transport-oriented NFV is typically used. And then Ericsson's orchestration system manages both Cisco's and Ericsson's lower level management systems.

Some wins discussed:

3 Italy

C&W

Aster Dominican Republic

Vodafone PT

Evolved WiFi networks in Africa

Next Generation Network - Middle East

W transformation. Vodafone Hutchinson AU

IP Transformation - Telefonica Latam

As we explained earlier, the partners discussed new three initiatives discussed for the future:

Collaboration Mobile Convergence mobile phone used as enterprise device). UC, presence, messaging from Cisco using its Spark offering and Telco TAS delivering VoLTE from ERIC. CMC is intended to allow mobile phones to be useful communications devices for enterprise users. In this case, users will make VoLTE calls using the regular dialer of the phone and can use collaboration capabilities using the Cisco Spark application. Avail late 2017. There is a press release with more detail.